I'm sure you already know this , but as I understand it pre 2010 you select a face/plane, select the normal to command and the model places that face/plane normal to the screen...

...2010 no face or plane needs pre-selecting.

I think it is limited to the standard xyz co-ordinates so a face at an angle will not be placed normal to the screen unless pre-selected (I could be wrong but that was not demonstrated on the upgrade day). However without selecting anything but invoking the 'normal to' command in a sketch will put that sketch normal to the screen.

Not really sure how often I'd use it but frustrating when it does not work as described.

You can still select a face/plane in SW2010 amd with the single click command you'll be able to select "Normal To".

Maybe I'm missing something but works just the same for me in 2010. Ihave 2006 open right now and opened the same part in 2010 and with the above desribed method it works just like 2006, actually faster because of the single click command.

I think it is a bug that it does not work when View Transitions are turned off. I am going to have the developer who implemented this enhancement investigate why it is not working when transitions are off. Stay tuned...

This problem has been addressed in the development code for SolidWorks 2010 SP3 (due for release mid to late April assuming all testing and production goes well). It is also listed as SPR#531110 with a status of implemented in SolidWorks 2010 SP3 if you look it up in the SolidWorks Knowledge Base in the customer portal.

One question however, I noticed that SP3, if it is released even by mid April, is taking unually long to be released (just over 3 months). Is there any light you can shed on this or is SP3 covering more SPR's than usual?

I am not sure of the exact details, but my guess is it was scheduled for this time because of the timing of SolidWorks 2011 development. We just came out of a development period for SolidWorks 2011 so there are more developers freed up now to work on service pack SPRs.

1. From an open model or 3D sketch, with nothing selected, press the spacebar.

2. From the

Orientation dialog box, double-click Normal To .

The model aligns with the rotated coordinate system

does not work for me apart from in a 2D sketch.

Is this going to be a graphics card issue?

or is there a setting I'm missing?

When I try this, the view orientation changes to the nearest orthogonal view. If the view is already orthogonal, then it flips 180 degrees. So if say I open a new part and do it first thing, without selecting anything first, the view orientation changes to front view.

I couldn't find in help where it says that "normal TO: is supposed to function this way, but it does what you describe.

""When I try this, the view orientation changes to the nearest orthogonal view. If the view is already orthogonal, then it flips 180 degrees. So if say I open a new part and do it first thing, without selecting anything first, the view orientation changes to front view.""

confirm, this is the exact activity I'm getting with 2010, only add, if a sketch or face is selected it goes to that.

Sorry to take a little while getting back to you. I'm only using 2010 at home, and I wanted to check to see if what I remembered was realyy the case.

I searched for "orientation" and the first choice took me to "SolidWorks Fundamentals / Display / Manipulating Views / View Orientation." That entry includes a section called "Viewing Models Normal To" which only describes how to preselect and get a view normal to the selection. The description also looked complete, so I didn't look further.

For my money, I'm leary of search-based help. That's probably because I particurlarly dislike the MS Office help, which seems to me so disfunctional. SW help is much, much better, of course, and always seemed to me to be very good. I much prefer, though, a heirarchical help file with an extensive index. The heirarchy helps assure that topics are not covered more than once, which seems to me to be the problem in this case. Like the sin of double dimensions on a drawing and the risk having conflicting dimensions, where topics are covered more than once in help it is hard to keep things in agreement.

Actually, the new functionality is in fact mentioned in that topic that you were looking at. If you look at the second "tip" (with the little light bulb) is says "You can also use Normal To to orient a model or 3D sketch with XYZ coordinates" which is a hyperlink to a description of the new functionality. We try not to make help topics extraordinarily long, hence why this is linked out to a separate topic. This also makes it so we can list it separately in a hierarchical nature (it is listed as the next topic in the table of contents). Finally, it makes it so we can re-use the topic in the What's New which allows for consistency and saves time in writing (so we can spend more time improving the overall content of the help).

The problem with an index is it is very, very hard to set up in the first place and very difficult to maintain. It also becomes limited to the terminology used in the index. So, if you are thinking of a term and we haven't used it in the index, you are kind of at a dead end. One of the nice things about the search we have implemented is it supports synonyms so if you search for a certain term and there are known synonyms for it, it automatically also searches for those terms.

Anyway, I just thought I'd give you a bit of background on one advantage of the search based approach. There are many more advantages and I hope you find it to be better once you start using it a bit more.